Instant Messaging (IM) technology is a terminal service technology, which enables two or more terminals to exchange text messages and document files in real-time through the network, and to realize voice or video interaction, etc.
As IM software is being applied to more and more occasions and is used more and more frequently, users are no longer satisfied by communicating in the form of chat. The users want to use IM to share with other users of entertainment resources, learning materials, experimental data, and office documents, etc., that is, to realize the function of transferring files between the users (or simply called file transfer). In current IM software, file transfer operations are shown in FIG. 1.
When the recipient accepts the file transfer request, IM will establish one or more network connections used to transmit data in the file. However, individual files are often independent from each other, when transferring all files in a folder, both the sender and the recipient need to perform some complex and repetitive operations.
For example, the sender needs to select a file to be transmitted multiple times, or to select multiple files at the same time, or even to traverse all subdirectories to select files in each sub-directory of the folder when the folder has subdirectories. On the other hand, the recipient needs to repeatedly click the button for accepting the file, or to repeatedly specify the file storage path.
In addition, when transferring all files in a folder, the folder's original folder hierarchy and organizational structure cannot be directly reflected in the transferred files themselves. The sender and recipient need additional communication in order for the recipient to understand the original folder structure, and the recipient needs to perform file management operations before or after receiving the files (including creating a folder and modifying the file storage directory, etc.).
When users face the above scenarios, often the sender may first use WINRAR or other compression software to pack the files in the folder into a compressed package, and then send the compressed package to the recipient by a single file transfer. The recipient can finally uncompress the compressed package to obtain the original files. Although the compression and decompression operations can reduce the complexity of file transfer to a certain degree, such operations may still give users an undesired user experience.
The disclosed methods and systems are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.